Jessica Sharp 
This post was co-authored by Jessica Sharp, Co-Principal of Maven Communications, and Travis Coley, Managing Director at Whitepenny.
There’s a new acronym making the rounds in marketing meetings this year: GEO, which stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of shaping how AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude describe your brand when someone asks a question in your category. Like Google searches before, people are asking AI for recommendations, providing a new kind of visibility for brands.
The AI platforms that decide what content to share when a prompt is entered are trained on newspaper articles, trade publications, Reddit, and third-party earned coverage. This is unlike SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, which doesn’t rely on these elements at all.
Third-Party Validation Is at the Core of PR
Right now, with AI, anyone can produce massive amounts of content quickly. What can’t be produced with AI is credibility. That’s where third-party earned media coverage comes into play. When an established publication or well-respected outlet covers your brand in a positive way, it provides credibility. Cultivating these media relationships is at the core of what PR firms do for clients. Our relationships with real journalists let us place consistent messaging on credible platforms, and that coverage builds a brand’s reputation over years.
PR as Strategy and Tactic
Muck Rack analyzed more than 25 million links cited by AI platforms and found that roughly 84 percent point back to earned media, including journalism, third-party coverage, research, and other content a brand didn’t write itself. This is a major shift in online search. For decades, PR competed with SEO and paid media for budget and attention, often with a shrinking share of the total. The mass adoption of AI as a search tool is changing that competition. Those who hold the budget strings know that earned media placements, bylined articles, and third-party coverage are now working double duty as training and retrieval data that shapes AI-generated answers.
Brand Has Never Mattered More
Another important element in GEO is brand clarity. An AI answer compresses everything ever written about your industry or company’s area of expertise into a few dozen words or sentences. That compression is brutal for companies that aren’t specific about what they stand for. Terms like “innovative solutions” and “client-centric” compress to nothing, and the AI moves on to a brand with a sharp, differentiated position. That’s often your competition.
With AI pulling together sources in milliseconds, your company’s position needs to be clear and consistent everywhere it appears.
Your Website Is No Longer Negotiable
The greatest and most natural place for consistent brand visibility is your own website, and how we think about websites is shifting with the advent of AI. Owned content accounts for a smaller fraction of what AI models cite, but your website is still the platform that houses your owned media, thought leadership, and brand narrative. If you’ve spent the time, effort, and budget earning third-party coverage and building a reputation, you can’t afford to lose that momentum with a website that isn’t built for AI visibility.
When an AI model finds valuable earned media, it turns to your website to confirm what it found. If a site is built for a Google crawler or a human skimmer and not an AI model, the AI moves on to another website that is. We call this “machine-legible.”
Machine-legible websites share five traits:
- A brand position sharp enough to quote. “Innovative solutions for forward-thinking organizations” and “We put clients first” compress to nothing. The site has to lead with one specific claim the model can hand a buyer as the reason to choose you.
- Structure a machine can parse. Clean semantic markup, headings that answer real questions, and content organized to be lifted and cited.
- Consistency across every source. The site is your single source of record, the statement the model trusts when your press, listings, and profiles disagree. When they all say the same thing, you win the tie.
- Specificity over adjectives. Named verticals, named outcomes, real numbers. Vague language gets cut in compression; specifics survive.
- Proof the model can trust. The earned coverage and third-party validation, on the site and easy to connect to everything written about you off it.
Get those five right and the machine reads brand, coverage, and website as one signal pointing the same direction.
The Bottom Line
Back-to-basics PR, sharper brand positioning, and a website built to hold up under machine scrutiny are the three essential elements in today’s AI search landscape. GEO isn’t a new discipline; it’s a recognition that brand, earned coverage, and web presence are part of the same story, and now a machine is reading that story and repeating back what it finds. Get all three saying the same thing, consistently, and you’ve done the work GEO is named for.
Posted In AI, Public Relations, Technology